[opendtv] Re: News: The Wi-Fi in Your Handset

>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/technology/29phones.html?th&emc=th
>
>July 29, 2006
>
>The Wi-Fi in Your Handset
>By MATT RICHTEL

Looks like one of the better articles on this subject, because it goes 
beyond the usual superficial hype about how Wi-Fi can make everything free.

The tradeoffs to the regional Bells are interesting. If they convert their 
entire voice telephony system to IP, they can forego the expensive 
connection-oriented switches they now use, like their SONET ADMs, so in 
principle they could save some infrastructure costs.

On the other hand, if they now use primarily their voice telephony revenues 
to support their cable plants, and those plants are also shared by the 
packet-switched Internet, then the costs of maintaining these cabled 
networks will have to be covered some other way. I'd say, your broadband 
connection fees will go up, as you drop your traditional phone service fees.

As to the Wi-Fi aspect itself, I'd say that there's no free lunch. As the 
article explains, Wi-Fi hotspots are hotspots because that's how Wi-Fi was 
designed to work. If it had been designed for ubiquitous coverage, like cell 
nets are, then the band would not have been unlicensed and there would have 
been a larger number of frequency bands available to it. And surely, if one 
expects seamless indoor and outdoor coverage from Wi-Fi, that's even more 
true. In any case, whatever company takes it upon itself to try to deploy 
continuous Wi-Fi coverage will end up doing what the cell companies have had 
to do, in terms of building up the RF infrastructure, and still I don't see 
how they can achiieve that goal legally over the Wi-Fi 2.4 GHz allocation.

My take on this is that a wholesale shift to VoIP and use of Wi-Fi hotspots 
instead of, or in addition to, cell towers should, in principle, be the 
telco-oriiented equipment vendors like Nortel and the smaller cell phone 
companies. In the US, there would be a consolidation of wireless telephone 
companies as the wireless telephone protocol becomes a single standard. 
Maybe fewer cell towers overall, but each one capable of carrying more 
traffic. However, it seems that companies which now provide the lion's share 
of the cabled plant or the cell tower RF plant could restructure their costs 
and revenue streams, and ultimately survive. Someone still has to provide 
the infrastructure.

As usually happens, as a particular technology matures, the equipment and 
service providers consolidate. Similar to what happened to the family farm. 
Consumers come out ahead, in the sense that costs are kept low by greater 
economies of scale, but of course this won't stop anyone from vilifying the 
few gargantuan survivors in the game.

Bert

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